This article originally appeared on Livemint.

India’s information technology (IT) industry has become such a global phenomenon that the Indian IT-guy character is a regular in American film and television storylines. Beyond the stereotypes, however, the IT-enabled services (ITeS) industry can be credited with leading India’s transformation from an agrarian to a services economy, repositioning the country as a knowledge hub and helping drive economic growth.

An industry that was once dominated by global giants such as IBM and HP now boasts home-grown companies that have outpaced their global peers, with India’s share of the global IT offshoring market growing from 40-45% to around 55% in the past 10 years. By 2020, industry body National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) forecasts the IT-BPO industry to account for 10% of India’s GDP, almost a fifth of its exports and about 30 million direct and indirect jobs.

As Subroto Bagchi, founder and former chairman of Mindtree, says, “What makes me really proud of the ITeS industry is the number of jobs it has created. Now, millions of people in India earn more than ₹5 lakh per annum—often much higher than their parental incomes.”

Finally, success has come based on what one knew, rather than who one knew.

According to Bagchi, “ITeS was perhaps the first industry to capitalize on economic liberalization. Earlier, it used to be much tougher to travel abroad and repatriate funds. Liberalization changed all that.”

The path of India’s ITeS industry can be traced in four phases. Of course, the journey is gradual and the phases overlap, but we have tried to fix time-frames to each phase for the sake of a chronological narrative.

Read the full article at Livemint.

Bhanu Singh is a partner with Bain & Co. and leads the firm’s India Technology, Media and Telecom practice and Bain’s Global Capability Sourcing practice. Prateek Majumdar is a principal in the firm and a member of the IT Services practice in India.